Christmas part I

This is traditionally the time of year that I dread most because it’s so built up, you get your hopes high for marvelous things to happen but yet terribly things happen too which you remember for years afterwords which is what fills you with the dread at the same time that your wishing for marvelous things to happen.

This year is finally progressing marvelously. I got everything baked and bought in time. Mom came over for a short time on Wednesday. She’s hooked on white merlot now (maybe I shouldn’t be using the term “hooked” in that sentence) so I bought her a bottle of it but Haskell’s only had the big-ass bottle left so she is now the proud owner of a 1.5 liter bottle of wine to keep herself warm on New Year’s Eve. I told her she can’t drink it all at once.

I then went over to my aunt and uncle’s house in St. Paul Park. This is my dad’s brother Jerry, the one with the best sense of humor. My four cousins came over too which was so frickin’ awesome I could barely stand it. I have one cousin, Todd, who wears one white sock and one black sock. His hair is a bit messed up and he didn’t shave. His older brother Dean has changed his name to Larz and apparently has great directional difficulty (perhaps it’s the left hand/right hand trouble I have) so he and his woman were the last to arrive. Cousin #3 Jeff is a paramedic and brought his new girlfriend, the N. Mpls cop who works with Mederia Arradondo whom I knew for a year when he was the spotter on the Roosevelt gymnastics team in ’84-’85. Last cousin Jo Lynn brought her twelve-year-old son Zach who is just about the tallest one in the room. As each person would arrive, the one-liners would zing at higher and higher speeds. We all find it hysterically funny to make fun of and slightly threaten each other. That can be done in a funny way, it really can.

When it was time for present-opening, I was sitting next to Jerry. Jo Lynn brought out a present for him which was a case engulfed in a Christmas-patterned garbage bag. It looked like a gun case to me so I blurted out “Oo, it’s a gun!” then proceeded to ask if bullets were included. I got the super glare from Jo Lynn and aunt Leigh Ann. Apparently I had hit the nail on the head and it was in fact a 30.6 with a scope and all. I asked Jerry to keep it away from Jo Lynn otherwise she’d shoot me with it. But come on though, gun cases are pretty easily identified. Did they really think Jerry wasn’t going to figure that one out? I was just stating the obvious.

I love watching people open presents. The best part of any holiday is getting too many people to sit in a small room and open presents. There’s wrapping paper everywhere and even though there are garbage bags brought out especially to help clean up while the present-opening is occurring, none of the paper ever seems to make it into the bags until about an hour later.

Christmas day will now bring some movie watching courtesy of Netflix who delivered The Dark Knight and Idiocracy on Wednesday, just in time for me to have a great Christmas. I’ll then move on to the other side of the family to dine and chat for a bit. This side of the family has little to no sense of humor so I’ll most likely be making an early exit. When they make fun of people, they mean it.

I have to go kick The Cat off of the new comfy blanket I got from my BFF and watch a little entertainment on the boob tube. How did that saying ever get started? Porn has never been on network TV as far as I know.